At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  III

  O thou the silent darkenesse of the night,

  Arme me with desperate courage and contempt,

  Of gods—lou’d men, now I applaud the guile,

  Of our brave roarers which select this time

  To drink and swagger, and spurne at all the powers

  Of either world.

  THOMAS GOFFE, 163115

  What did directly affect the tenor of upper-class society, if not masquerades, was the opportunity evening granted for rowdier escapades. Bloods, bucks, and blades, roarers and gallants—upper-class libertines went by a variety of titles. For them, the natural mask of darkness, not vizards of brocade, afforded a refuge from the regimen of courtly life. They embraced night as a time of boundless freedom. In train were assorted youths of gentle breeding, equally disdainful of polite society. No one city claimed a monopoly, for nearly every European capital, and many a large town, had its share of delinquent aristocrats. By the mid-eighteenth century, early American cities even spawned small bands of “bucks.” In New York, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, during a visit in 1744, encountered “three young rakes” bent on “whoreing”; in Philadelphia, six youths “in the dress of gentlemen” brutalized a woman, first throwing her to the ground. And though certain eras, such as the Restoration in late seventeenth-century England, saw their numbers grow, few periods were free of gallants.16

  Their behavior bespoke a fierce individualism, contemptuous of hypocrisy and social conformity in the pursuit of wealth and riches. Guilty on both scores were courtiers, clerics, and men of trade, all wedded to lives of artifice and false propriety. To gallants, the chivalric ideal of personal honor had long given way to servility, good manners, and fealty to king and country. In Night, his ode to libertinism published in 1761, the dissolute poet Charles Churchill affirmed,

  Let slaves to business, bodies without soul,

  Important blanks in nature’s mighty roll,

  Solemnize nonsense in the day’s broad glare,

  We NIGHT prefer, which heals or hides our care.

  Such men, “unpractis’d in deceit,” were “too resolute” to “brook affronts,” “too proud to flatter, too sincere to lie, too plain to please”—at least, that is, during the hours of darkness, when repressive forces were weakest. More important, instead, was the unbridled pursuit of pleasure that nighttime encouraged. Gratification, free of social obligations and constraints. Stated the author of The Libertine (1683), “Long tales of heav’n to fools are given, / But we put in pleasure to make the scale even.” Appalled by such libertinism, Henry Peacham warned in The Compleat Gentleman (1622) that “to be drunke, sweare, wench, follow the fashion and to do just nothing are the attributes and markes nowadayes of a great part of our gentry.”17

  In cities and towns, blades typically slept much of the day, drinking and roaring after sunset. Some cavorted openly at aristocratic gatherings, to the shock of less debauched company. At a concert in 1706, the Duke of Richmond proposed extinguishing all the candles so that guests “might do as they list [choose],” prompting more sober heads to object “while so many of their wives and relations were present.” More often, young males shunned polite entertainments in favor of coarser fare, relishing the low life of brothels and alehouses. “To drink away their brains, and piss away their estates,” according to a critic. “Lords of the street,” they were christened by Samuel Johnson, “flushed as they are with folly, youth and wine.” Emphasized a London newspaper in 1730, “There is a certain pleasure in sometimes descending.”18

  In fact, one suspects that social elites in general, notwithstanding their professed distaste for the poor, often envied their “vulgar pleasures.” This was a theme of Richard Steele’s comedy The Gentleman (17??), to judge from a surviving portion. “I think you are happier than we masters,” Sir Harry Severn tells his servant Tom Dimple, before joining him and the “lower world” for a night’s merriment. In 1718, the Duchess of Orleans confided to a friend, “The peasant-folk of Schwetzingen and Oftersheim used to gather around and talk to me, and they were more entertaining than the duchesses in the cercle.” No less a figure than the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1500–1558), tradition has it, delighted in the vulgar manners of a peasant with whom, one night, he was forced to shelter outside Brussels. Reportedly, Charles laughed heartily at the peasant’s coarse speech as he urinated, unaware of his sovereign’s identity. “You are farting,” reprimanded Charles, upon which the peasant retorted, “There is no good horse that does not fart while pissing!”19

  William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress (pl. 3), 1735. Note in this riotous scene of a tavern chamber the broken lantern and staff at the young gallant’s feet, spoils from scouring the nightwatch. Meanwhile, his own watch is lost to a pair of prostitutes.

  James Boswell, the future Laird of Auchinleck, derived periodic pleasure from consorting at night with streetwalkers. On a visit to Germany, he recorded in his journal, “In the evening I must needs go and look at the Dresden streetwalkers, and amuse myself as I used to do in London. Low. Low.” Besides supplying carnal gratification, “low debauchery” held great interest for Boswell, who donned a disguise for some outings. In June 1763, to celebrate “the King’s birthnight” in London, he wore a ragged dark suit along with “dirty buckskin breeches and black stockings.” Determined “to be a blackguard and to see all that was to be seen,” he wenched his way across the city, alternately calling himself a barber, a soldier, and finally, to a young prostitute in Whitehall, a highwayman! “I came home about two o’clock, much fatigued,” he wrote. Even ecclesiastics forsook their vows by cavorting in drinking houses and brothels. In seventeenth-century Flanders, two officials, Dean Henri Wiggers and Canon Arnold Cryters, during their “night games” not only drank and gambled in taverns but also danced and brawled. “Run him through,” shouted the canon to his embattled friend one tumultuous evening at the Corona tavern. Travelers in Italian cities attributed their want of street lamps to prelates anxious to conduct sexual affairs in the dark. Volunteered a visitor to Rome, “The darkness of the streets has been in itself alledged, as having an object not strictly spiritual.”20

  Genteel women were not immune to night’s appeal. Besides the burdens of courtly civility, they faced domestic constraints. Even more than other women, their lives revolved around the home, with fewer opportunities for personal fulfillment or independence. Of forced marriages suffered by young maidens, the heroine of the ballad “Loves Downfall” bemoans, “Would I had been a scullian-maid / Or a servant of low degree, / Then need not I have been afraid, / To ha’ loved him that would love me.” Once married, complained Margaret Cavendish, women had “to live in constant masquerade,” hiding their true selves. Remarked a woman in Cavendish’s Orations (1662), men “would fain bury us in their houses or beds, as in a grave.” As a result, she remonstrated, “We are as ignorant of our selves, as men are of us.”21

  Consigned by day to the domestic sphere, upper-class wives and daughters occasionally took flight at night, notwithstanding traditional injunctions against unescorted travel. As one woman advised another in a seventeenth-century tale, “Since he barreth you of your libertie in the day, take it your selfe in the night.” A character in The Corbaccio (ca. 1365), by Boccaccio, marvels at the ability of women to cross great distances at night for illicit meetings, despite their normal fears of “ghosts, spirits, and phantoms.” Some wives reportedly assumed dual identities. The London playwright George Chapman wrote in 1599 of a “hundred ladies in this towne that wil dance, revill all night amongst gallants, and in the morning goe to bed to her husband as cleere a woman as if she were new christned.” Besides frequenting genteel diversions like masquerades, aristocratic wives were said to game, riot, and whore. Hence, for example, the promiscuous likes of Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine in the Restoration court, after whom Samuel Pepys lusted. Such was her love of gaming that she allegedly “won £15,0
00 in one night and lost £25,000 in another night at play.” An April evening in 1683 found three “gentelwomen of Cambridge,” attired in male gowns, breaking windows and assaulting female pedestrians. Madame de Murant, the estranged wife of the Count de Rousillon, was reported to sing “lewd songs during the night, and at all hours” with her lesbian lover, even “pissing out the window” of her Paris home after “prolonged debauchery.” Plainly, while literary depictions reflected misogynist fears of infidelity, night afforded scattered numbers of women a measure of personal autonomy, not just at home but also, in some cases, abroad. Of mornings, Montesquieu claimed, “Often the husband’s day began where his wife’s ended.”22

  William Hogarth, The Bagnio (pl. 5 of Marriage à la Mode), 1745. Following a masquerade, the lawyer Silvertongue and the Countess have repaired to a bathhouse of ill repute, only to be pursued by her husband, the Earl, who is mortally wounded in the ensuing confrontation.

  Descending the social ladder for persons of property was not always easy. Nocturnal frolics, especially in unfamiliar neighborhoods, posed myriad risks, not least negotiating one’s way through the muck of ill-lit streets. In the play Squire Oldsapp: or, the Night Adventures (1679), the character Henry laments, “Ah, plague’o these night-rambles; the trouble a man gets in finding his way home after ’em, is more by half than the pleasure he gets by ’em.” Boswell, after one of his drunken expeditions, returned home “all dirty and bruised.” Unescorted women ran the risks of taunts and jeers, or worse, even at polite entertainments. In 1748, Lady Charlotte Johnston and two friends ventured into the “dark walks” of London’s Vauxhall Gardens, a notorious spot for midnight assignations. Whatever their reasons (prurient curiosity perhaps), they were mistaken for prostitutes, chased by a half-dozen drunken apprentices, and assaulted. Moreover, it was one thing to dress as a ruffian, and quite another to behave as one. The London law student Dudley Ryder became tongue-tied whenever approaching a prostitute. “I am under a strange confusion and hurry when I attack a whore and cannot tell how to talk to them freely,” he confessed in his diary. Boswell, despite his shabby costume, found it difficult to hide his true identity when consorting with prostitutes. “Notwithstanding of my dress,” he later noted with thinly veiled pride, “I was always taken for a gentleman in disguise.”23

  Some social friction was unavoidable. An Irishman wrote of the mannered gentleman who, having spent the “whole day in company he hates,” turns at night to vice “among company that as heartily hate him.” Claiming to be a “gentleman and a scholar,” Francis Woodmash, while drunk, antagonized a table of tradesmen at a London alehouse by speaking Latin. A flurry of heated insults followed—“Blockhead,” “Brandy-Face,” “Irish Rogue”—before Woodmash killed one of them with his sword. Other gallants, however, appear to have frolicked freely with the lower orders, at least until tempers warmed. Of an evening in a Covent Garden alehouse, a “watchman” reported in a newspaper:

  Bullies, whores, bawds, pimps, lords, rakes, beaux, fops, players, fiddlers, singers, dancers, &c. who are strangely mixed together. You will sometimes find a Lord in deep conversation with a pimp, a Member of P—— explaining his privilege to a whore; a bawd, with a great deal of prudency, exclaiming to a rake against riots, a whore with a fribble, a beau with a butcher, and yet all hail fellow well met, as the saying is; till the gentleman get quite drunk, and then the bullies, sharpers, whores, bawds, pimps, &c. get to their trade of kicking up a dust, as they call it, and begin to fleece those who have any money. Now begins the high scene; swords, sticks, hats, wiggs, any thing, away they go; bloody noses, black eyes, broken heads, broken glasses, bottles, &c.24

  For drunken gallants, no jest at the expense of polite behavior or human decency seemed too outrageous. In Leeds, “young gentlemen,” for their late-night amusement, summoned persons from bed, falsely notifying them of some dying friend or relation. In June 1676, John Wilmont, the rakish second Earl of Rochester, together with three comrades, severely beat a constable in Epson after vainly searching for “a whore.” At a nearby tavern, they had already terrorized several fiddlers by “tossing” them “in a blanket for refusing to play.” Before the night ended, Rochester drew his sword, prompting one of his party to be slain by the nightwatch. Even Pepys, no prude, occasionally found his middle-class sensibilities shocked, such as when two blades, Sir Charles Sedley and Lord Buckhurst, reportedly ran “all the night with their arses bare through” London streets, “at last fighting and being beat by the watch.” On another evening, Pepys spied “two gallants and their footmen” drag off “a pretty wench” by “some force.” (“God forgive me,” he confessed, “what thought and wishes I had of being in their place.”) More unfortunate still was the fate of a provincial innkeeper who objected to noise made by “a party of Bucks.” Taking the path of her furniture, she was tossed out an upstairs window to her death.25

  Violent confrontations were inevitable among gallants who eschewed both the protections and the constraints of civil society. Swordplay and drunken brawls fueled youthful exuberance, making nocturnal escapades seem more heroic. Wrote the Earl of Rochester, “I’ll tell of whores attack’d, their Lords at home, / Bawds quarters beaten up, and fortress won: / Windows demolish’d, watches overcome.” A visitor to Lisbon complained of the late-night “squabbles of bullying rake-hells, who scour the streets in search of adventures.” Most violence was gratuitous and unprovoked. On a December night in 1693, three swordsmen paraded through London’s Salisbury Court, declaring “damn them they would kill the next man they met, making responses I will, I will, I will.” Vandalism was customary, with windows, doors, and street lamps broken and smashed. Young women, beaten and kicked, bore the brunt of their aggression. Some were pulled into dark streets from their beds. Targets included members of the nightwatch, lone symbols of royal authority whose advanced years made them objects of greater contempt. James Shirley’s play The Gamester (1633) spoke of “blades, that roar, / In brothels, and break windows, fright the streets, / At midnight worse that constables, and sometimes, / Set upon innocent bell-men.” Following a masquerade, a band of gallants that included the dukes of Monmouth and Richmond mortally wounded a watchman, a crime also imputed to the Duke of York before ascending the throne as James II (1633–1701). In turn, a small crowd led by two French noblemen, on an April night in 1741, attacked the front door of the mayor of Libourne, first with an axe, then with a battering ram.26

  Some cities saw the rise of nocturnal gangs composed of blades with servants and retainers in tow. Loosely organized at best, they acquired notorious reputations for violence. In Amsterdam, members of the Damned Crue routinely assailed innocent pedestrians at night, as did Chalkers in Dublin. Italian cities were beset by bands of young nobles and gentlemen. In Florence toward the late sixteenth century, a traveler discovered:

  The gentlemen in companies walked by nights in the streets, with rapyers, and close lanthornes, I meane halfe light, halfe darke, carrying the light syde towardes them, to see the way, and the darke syde from them, to be unseene of others, and if one company happened to meete with another, they turned their light syde of their lanthorns towardes the faces of those they mett, to knowe them, . . . and except they were acquainted frendes they seldome mett without some braule, or tumult at the least.

  Anon., Drunken Rakes and Watchmen in Covent Garden, 1735.

  In Rome, the painter Caravaggio belonged to a group of gallants that preyed on prostitutes and rival swordsmen. “Nec spe, nec metu” (“without hope or fear”) was their credo. In 1606, after killing a member of another gang in a brawl, Caravaggio was forced to flee to Naples.27 In London, members of the Bugles, formed in 1623, allegedly contained the scourings of “taverns and other debauched places,” led by “diverse knights, some young noblemen, and gentlemen.” In later years, London suffered such bands as the Scowrers and the Hectors, who cut their veins in order to “quaff their own blood.” Of Rochester’s Ballers, Pepys describ
ed an evening in which “young blades” danced naked with prostitutes. Most feared were the Mohocks, who acquired their name shortly after the well-publicized visit to London of four Iroquois chiefs from America. For several months in 1712, the city was terrorized by the gang’s brutality. Besides knifing pedestrians in the face, they stood women on their heads, “misusing them in barbarous manner.” Mohock numbers were such, taunted a handbill, that watchmen feared to make arrests. Jonathan Swift, concerned for his safety, resorted to riding in coaches at night and coming home early. “They shan’t cut mine [face],” he wrote, “I like it better as it is, the dogs will cost me at least a crown a week in chairs.” Lamented Sarah Cowper, “The manners of Indian savages are no[w] becoming accomplishments to English Earls, Lords, and gentlemen.”28

  In English literature, no pair of peers cavorted more famously than Prince Hal and his stout companion, Falstaff. In Part 1 of Henry IV (1598), we discover them conspiring with other rowdies, for the sake of a “jest,” to waylay wealthy travelers in the dark. Declares Falstaff to the prince, “There’s neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee, nor thou camest not of the blood royal, if thou darest not stand for ten shillings.” Real-life sovereigns of this sort reportedly included the peasant king Matthias of Hungary (1440–1490), France’s Francis I (1494–1547), and Francis Duke of Milan, who disguised himself at night as a peddler. Equally, it was said that though the Duke of Orleans, brother to Charles VI, “showed himself to be so pious during the day,” he “secretly” led “a very dissolute life at night,” which included heavy drinking and frolics with prostitutes. The Scandinavian monarch Christian II (1481–1559), as prince, quitted his hall to drink wine in Copenhagen taverns, having first bribed the nightwatch to open the castle gate. Another Danish king, Christian IV (1577–1648), was known to rampage through streets, breaking windows like other young aristocrats. Such, too, was said of England’s Henry VIII, whose “rambles” as a youth inspired the well-known tale of The King and the Cobbler, published in the seventeenth century. Charles II (1630–1685), during one of his “nocturnal rambles” with Rochester, reputedly visited a Newmarket brothel in “his usual disguise,” only to have his pocket picked by a prostitute. Perhaps most notorious were the escapades of Henry III of France, a devout Catholic by day who caroused on Paris streets at night, usually with faithful courtiers called mignons. Of these, a contemporary complained, “Their occupations are gambling, blaspheming, jumping, dancing, quarreling, fornicating, and following the King around.”29